Where those associated with Western films from around the world are laid to rest.

Friday, August 8, 2014

RIP Menahem Golan

Menahem Golan, Producer of 1980s Action Movies, Dies at 85

The Hollywood Reporter

By David Caspi

August 8, 2014

Legendary filmmaker Menahem Golan, co-founder of The
Cannon Group production company and Israeli cinema pioneer, has died. He was
85.

According to multiple Israeli news outlets, Golan lost
consciousness while strolling outside his house in the city of Jaffa with
family members in the early hours of Friday evening. Ambulances rushed to the
scene, and following attempts of more than an hour to resuscitate him,
paramedics pronounced him dead.

With cousin and partner Yoram Globus, Golan ran Cannon
Films for a decade, releasing more than a dozen films a year in its prime. They
bought the ailing company, which was launched in 1967, for $500,000 in 1979 and
fueled an appetite for B-films that was created by the invention of the VCR.
For a time, Cannon was on the brink of becoming the seventh Hollywood “major”
studio.

Golan produced more than 200 films including the action
hits The Delta Force (1986) starring Chuck Norris and the Death Wish sequels
toplined by Charles Bronson.

He also produced such high-octane fare as Missing in
Action (1984), also starring Norris, and its sequels; The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre 2 (1986); the lightly-regarded Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
(1987), which effectively killed the franchise for years; Masters of The
Universe (1987), starring Dolph Lundgren; and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Kickboxer
(1989).

Born Menahem Globus to Polish immigrants on May 31, 1929,
in the Northern Israeli city of Tiberias, he changed his surname for patriotic
reasons to the Hebrew name of Golan upon serving in the Israeli Air Force
during the country’s 1948 War of Independence. After finishing years of
filmmaking studies at the Old Vic School, the London Academy of Music and
Dramatic Art and New York University, he returned to Israeli and directed for
the stage.

In the early 1960s, Golan started working for cult film
producer Roger Corman on The Young Racers, which led to his own 1963
directorial debut of Israeli film El Dorado. A year later, he served as
producer of Sallah Shabati starring noted Israeli actor Chaim Topol, which went
on to win the Golden Globe for best foreign film and became the first Israeli
feature to be nominated at the Academy Awards in the category.

Golan co-founded local production company Noah Films;
named after his father, it was his first business endeavor with his cousin Yoram.
Noah Films was behind Academy Award nominated films 1972’s I Love You Rosa and
1973’s The House on Chelouche Street. In 1977, Golan directed Operation
Thunderbolt, based on the previous year’s real event of the Israeli raid on
Entebbe airport in Uganda, a movie that was nominated for an Academy Award for
best foreign language Film and led the way for the cousins to try and conquer
Hollywood.

The trials and tribulations of the cousins were recently
the focus of an Israeli documentary The Go Go Boys by director Hila Medalia,
which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Golan was in
attendance.

In the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold
Story of Cannon Films, which played this month at the Melbourne International
Film Festival, THR critic David Rooney notes that music supervisor Richard
Kraft likened the Cannon product pipeline to bowel movements dumped onto the
international market with scant concern for quality or plot coherence: “You
flush it. You make another one.”

By 1989, Golan had resigned from Canon, which folded
altogether four years later, while still courting Stan Lee's Marvel Comics and
managing to produce a 1990 version of Captain America under the 21st Century
Film Corp. His longtime efforts to produce a Spider-Man film fell short. Golan
soon returned to Israel and to theater in the early 90s and directed local
adaptations of such musicals as Annie and The Sound of Music. 21st Century Film
Corp. went bankrupt in 1996.

During the past two decades, Golan focused on local
productions and was the recipient of Israeli Film Academy’s Ophir Award for
Lifetime Achievement and The Israel Prize, given annually by the government for
excellence and contribution to cinema.

About Me

Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1946 I have a BA degree in American History from Cal St. Northridge. I've been researching the American West and western films since the early 1980s and visiting filming sites in Spain and the U.S.A. Elected a member of the Spaghetti Western Hall of Fame 2010.